Definitely not elves
Jun. 12th, 2021 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAlternative title: Dreamwidth made me read it! Two books linked only by that factor. And they both concern beings who are strictly speaking magical, but who defy you to speak strictly of them:
Back in March,sovay wrote about Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout: "The impediment," she said, "is that the book drives me up the wall."
What hooked me was that this was a book by an actual medievalist - and, it turns out, a Northumbrian by origin - and I had never heard of it. How did I fail to notice it when it was new (answer, I suspect, it was not published by Puffin)? Plus, it centres on Ely, a city I have more recently come to know. And it wasn't hard to come by a copy, nor silly expensive. Back tosovay's assessment:
I agree, up to a point. To begin with the easy one: my edition does not have the Trina Schart Hyman illustrations, and I'd never come across her work. A search didn't turn up her illustrations for this book, but judging from what I did find, she's likely to have been a good choice. My edition is not exactly illustrated, but has fancy chapter headings, which are credited as "decorations by Rosalind Dease". of which this is probably the fanciest:
So no complaints on that score. Other than that, and rather to my surprise, what I liked best about the book was the Swallows and Amazons aspect, the two children having a summer holiday adventure on the waterways of the fens, the part that grew out of the author's own holiday adventures. The watery landscape is magical - rather more so, to my taste, than the cathedral itself, though this was probably not the author's intention. Even the place names sparked his imagination: there really is a Pout Hall, a widening of the channel where two lodes meet and where you might well moor overnight, as the family in the story do.
I like the family, too. The relationship between the children is both touching and entirely believable - well, almost entirely: do children quote Walter de la Mare at each other? Did they, even 50 years ago? And did children, even 50 years ago, have quite this much freedom? My adult brain goes But what are their parents THINKING? (admittedly, not an entirely unfamiliar reaction); are these parents, too, of the better drowned than duffers persuasion?
For here is my main difficulty with the book, the ease with which Sandy and Sally align themselves with Pout. He is am intriguing, but also an unnerving figure, and much depends on whether you see him as a trickster figure or something more sinister. His stories and his language are entertaining, but he is asking the children to do things they don't understand. He sets them searching for the green hellebore, and their reference book tells them several things about this plant, but doesn't mention that it is poisonous... There wouldn't be much of a story if the children questioned this too soon (Chapter Fourteen is titled "Sandy Has Doubts", but Sally prevails) or if the adults curtailed their freedom to take risks - and the most I think I can say without spoilers is that this consideration shapes what is so very unsatisfying about that last chapter. My questions are answered, but I don't much like the answer.
But the things I do like about the book outweigh those that I don't, and I am grateful for the introducion. Can I claim that Dreamwidth also introduced me to Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin? I have been vaguely aware of it (and her) for longer than I can pin down, but it wasnineweaving who finally made the introduction, at a Book Club organised by Handheld Books.
The Coming of Pout had me from the very opening, and my reservations about it came later. With Kingdoms of Elfin I travelled in the opposite direction, finding the first few stories - maybe not heavy going, but more duty than pleasure. This, I thought, is why I've never read Sylvia Townsend Warner... Despite that impeccable introduction, the stories were disconcerting. Thanks tonineweaving, I knew that these were not Elves, but Elfins, and that their kingdoms were filled not with magic but with the precise particularity of the here and now. Handheld Books led me astray, quoting Neil Gaiman in the cover copy: "A book for anyone who has heard the horns of Elfin in the distance at twilight..." But these Kingdoms are not some remote Otherwhere: they aren't even kingdoms, if by that you understand an extended territory. The book is interested in life at court, its personnel and rituals, and it visits a variety of Elfin courts, from Brocéliande in Brittany to Blokula in Lapland, but it returns repeatedly to northern England and the Scottish Borders. The Climate of Exile tells of the migration of Coventina's court north of Hadrian's Wall. Residents in the locations of specific stories can probably point to the precise hill under which the fairies live...
I seem to have lost the thread of my argument, but I won't rewrite it, because this, in fact, is the process by which I began to tune my ear to Warner's Elfins. Like the shards of colour in a kaleidoscope, the details fell into different patterns as story followed story: How interesting, aristocratic fairies can fly, but don't, except when they do (much as Nero Wolfe never leaves his house, or permits a woman to stay in it...). How interesting, this is all about life within the royal courrs, except for a variety of exiles and outcasts and travellers. How interesting, stories about Elfins but which return obsessively to their relations with humans (who they naturally find as strange and mysterious as we find them). And so on, from story to story, and just one more... and it seems I am hooked after all.
This makes it sound as if the appeal lies in the patterns thwmselves, the signs of worldbuilding. But if anything, the opposite is true, the charm is in Warner's refusal to be drawn into worldbuilding, or emotional truth, or anything else: late in her life and after the death of her partner, 'tired of the human heart', Warner's characters, human and elfin alike, seem to possess hearts - they love and they cease to love - but they are not interested in examining those emotions. And nor is she, and nor does she want to involve the reader in such questions. She tells a story: this happened, and then this, and this - and that's the end. There's no conclusion of the sort that rounds off and gives meaning to the preceding narrative; indeed, there's something of the shaggy dog story in the refusal to provide any such thing.
Elsewhere, Strange Horizons conducted a book club discussion about Kingdoms of Elfin. Anything I might have said about Susannah Clarke is said there, by people much better read than I am. I was very much taken by this identification by Zen Cho (whom I don't otherwise know) of a completely different kinship: "But actually the closest reading experience I could think of was Saki's short stories. You feel Reginald or Clovis would not be out of place among the Elfin." Surely there's a family ressemblance there: so mannered, so detached, such control of the short story form ... Appropriately for an Elfin kinship, it cuts across time, and that's one more thing that consistently wrong-footed me about Kingdoms of Elfin: however tempting it may be to set it alongside Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees and even Lolly Willowes, it is not a contemporary of these books. These stories were written in the 1970, in a world where Tolkien was not only published, he was becoming widely read. I wonder whether the use of the word 'elfins' rather than 'elves' is a declaration that no, this is not the same thing at all. Which is nothing but the truth.
Back in March,
sovay wrote about Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout: "The impediment," she said, "is that the book drives me up the wall." What hooked me was that this was a book by an actual medievalist - and, it turns out, a Northumbrian by origin - and I had never heard of it. How did I fail to notice it when it was new (answer, I suspect, it was not published by Puffin)? Plus, it centres on Ely, a city I have more recently come to know. And it wasn't hard to come by a copy, nor silly expensive. Back to
sovay's assessment:It is not a bad book in most of the usual senses; it just collapses so completely in the last chapter that it's difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't willing to be disappointed. Until then, I love quite a few things about it, including its trickster, its fenlands, its brother and sister caught up in the midsummer mystery, and its illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman.
I agree, up to a point. To begin with the easy one: my edition does not have the Trina Schart Hyman illustrations, and I'd never come across her work. A search didn't turn up her illustrations for this book, but judging from what I did find, she's likely to have been a good choice. My edition is not exactly illustrated, but has fancy chapter headings, which are credited as "decorations by Rosalind Dease". of which this is probably the fanciest:
So no complaints on that score. Other than that, and rather to my surprise, what I liked best about the book was the Swallows and Amazons aspect, the two children having a summer holiday adventure on the waterways of the fens, the part that grew out of the author's own holiday adventures. The watery landscape is magical - rather more so, to my taste, than the cathedral itself, though this was probably not the author's intention. Even the place names sparked his imagination: there really is a Pout Hall, a widening of the channel where two lodes meet and where you might well moor overnight, as the family in the story do.
I like the family, too. The relationship between the children is both touching and entirely believable - well, almost entirely: do children quote Walter de la Mare at each other? Did they, even 50 years ago? And did children, even 50 years ago, have quite this much freedom? My adult brain goes But what are their parents THINKING? (admittedly, not an entirely unfamiliar reaction); are these parents, too, of the better drowned than duffers persuasion?
For here is my main difficulty with the book, the ease with which Sandy and Sally align themselves with Pout. He is am intriguing, but also an unnerving figure, and much depends on whether you see him as a trickster figure or something more sinister. His stories and his language are entertaining, but he is asking the children to do things they don't understand. He sets them searching for the green hellebore, and their reference book tells them several things about this plant, but doesn't mention that it is poisonous... There wouldn't be much of a story if the children questioned this too soon (Chapter Fourteen is titled "Sandy Has Doubts", but Sally prevails) or if the adults curtailed their freedom to take risks - and the most I think I can say without spoilers is that this consideration shapes what is so very unsatisfying about that last chapter. My questions are answered, but I don't much like the answer.
But the things I do like about the book outweigh those that I don't, and I am grateful for the introducion. Can I claim that Dreamwidth also introduced me to Sylvia Townsend Warner's Kingdoms of Elfin? I have been vaguely aware of it (and her) for longer than I can pin down, but it was
nineweaving who finally made the introduction, at a Book Club organised by Handheld Books. The Coming of Pout had me from the very opening, and my reservations about it came later. With Kingdoms of Elfin I travelled in the opposite direction, finding the first few stories - maybe not heavy going, but more duty than pleasure. This, I thought, is why I've never read Sylvia Townsend Warner... Despite that impeccable introduction, the stories were disconcerting. Thanks to
nineweaving, I knew that these were not Elves, but Elfins, and that their kingdoms were filled not with magic but with the precise particularity of the here and now. Handheld Books led me astray, quoting Neil Gaiman in the cover copy: "A book for anyone who has heard the horns of Elfin in the distance at twilight..." But these Kingdoms are not some remote Otherwhere: they aren't even kingdoms, if by that you understand an extended territory. The book is interested in life at court, its personnel and rituals, and it visits a variety of Elfin courts, from Brocéliande in Brittany to Blokula in Lapland, but it returns repeatedly to northern England and the Scottish Borders. The Climate of Exile tells of the migration of Coventina's court north of Hadrian's Wall. Residents in the locations of specific stories can probably point to the precise hill under which the fairies live...I seem to have lost the thread of my argument, but I won't rewrite it, because this, in fact, is the process by which I began to tune my ear to Warner's Elfins. Like the shards of colour in a kaleidoscope, the details fell into different patterns as story followed story: How interesting, aristocratic fairies can fly, but don't, except when they do (much as Nero Wolfe never leaves his house, or permits a woman to stay in it...). How interesting, this is all about life within the royal courrs, except for a variety of exiles and outcasts and travellers. How interesting, stories about Elfins but which return obsessively to their relations with humans (who they naturally find as strange and mysterious as we find them). And so on, from story to story, and just one more... and it seems I am hooked after all.
This makes it sound as if the appeal lies in the patterns thwmselves, the signs of worldbuilding. But if anything, the opposite is true, the charm is in Warner's refusal to be drawn into worldbuilding, or emotional truth, or anything else: late in her life and after the death of her partner, 'tired of the human heart', Warner's characters, human and elfin alike, seem to possess hearts - they love and they cease to love - but they are not interested in examining those emotions. And nor is she, and nor does she want to involve the reader in such questions. She tells a story: this happened, and then this, and this - and that's the end. There's no conclusion of the sort that rounds off and gives meaning to the preceding narrative; indeed, there's something of the shaggy dog story in the refusal to provide any such thing.
Elsewhere, Strange Horizons conducted a book club discussion about Kingdoms of Elfin. Anything I might have said about Susannah Clarke is said there, by people much better read than I am. I was very much taken by this identification by Zen Cho (whom I don't otherwise know) of a completely different kinship: "But actually the closest reading experience I could think of was Saki's short stories. You feel Reginald or Clovis would not be out of place among the Elfin." Surely there's a family ressemblance there: so mannered, so detached, such control of the short story form ... Appropriately for an Elfin kinship, it cuts across time, and that's one more thing that consistently wrong-footed me about Kingdoms of Elfin: however tempting it may be to set it alongside Dunsany and Hope Mirrlees and even Lolly Willowes, it is not a contemporary of these books. These stories were written in the 1970, in a world where Tolkien was not only published, he was becoming widely read. I wonder whether the use of the word 'elfins' rather than 'elves' is a declaration that no, this is not the same thing at all. Which is nothing but the truth.
